A first attempt to archive the .EU domain

The .EU domain is commonly used to reference sites related to Europe. The strategy adopted to archive the World Wide Web has been delegating the responsibility of each domain to the respective national archiving institutions. However, the .EU domain fails to fit in this model because it covers multiple nations. Thus, the preservation of .EU sites was not been yet assigned and undertaken by any institution.

RESAW is an European network that aims to create a Research Infrastructure for the Study of Archived Web Materials (resaw.eu).

The Portuguese Web Archive performed a first attempt to crawl and preserve web sites hosted under the .EU domain performed by within the scope of RESAW activities. This first crawl began on the 21 November 2014 and finished on the 16 December 2014.

As future work we intend to perform 2 more crawls of the .EU domain. Each one of performed .EU crawls shall be indexed and become searchable through archive.pt one year after its finish date.

Collaborations with researchers interested on studying the collected web data sets or crawl logs are welcome.